Andrée Heuschling posed for Pierre Auguste Renoir - and married his son. A new
film, Renoir, charts her extraordinary life.

You get girls on bicycles everywhere. But there’s something about this particular girl on a bicycle – wheeling along a lane in the parched landscape of the Midi, with sunlight glinting through the trees overhead – that feels particularly French. Her long, billowing skirt suggests the early 20th century, while her round “granny” sunglasses feel more Sixties.

Even when she passes the effigy of a soldier in First World War German uniform hanging from a tree and arrives at a country house peopled with servants in Belle Époque garb, she continues moving to her own impulsive rhythms: a teenage girl discovering her powers as a woman, observing the world with a wilful, pouting scepticism, a timeless, quintessentially French character who can be encountered in an array of forms everywhere from the novels of Colette to the films of Brigitte Bardot.

Here in this house, surrounded by olive groves and bathed in Provençal light, she encounters not one, but two iconically French artists. On the one hand, the Impressionist painter Pierre Auguste Renoir, now in frail old age, for whom she has come to pose. On the other, his son Jean, on leave from active service in the war, and not yet embarked on the career that will make him one of the most influential film directors of the 20th century.

“When I found out about this woman who was able to make a link between the father and the son, between painting and the cinema, I realised I had a perfect subject,” says director Gilles Bourdos, whose new film, Renoir, is released this month. “It didn’t have to be a big movie, a full biography, it could stay around the house and the garden, keeping focused on the human situation.”

The woman referred to is Andrée Heuschling, the older Renoir’s last great muse, and the younger Renoir’s first wife, who starred in several of his early films and is often credited with propelling him towards a career in the cinema.

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In real life, Heuschling came to the house as a replacement for her elder sister, who had proved unsatisfactory as a model, and at the recommendation of Matisse. Bourdos’ film sets such factual considerations aside, with the enigmatic Andrée claiming to have been sent by Renoir’s long-dead wife. “A girl with no name, sent by a dead woman,” murmurs the elderly painter, played by veteran French actor Michel Bouquet, a dead ringer for the real Renoir in his tweed cap and muffling beard. Embodied by rising star Christa Theret, Andrée disrupts the placid routine of the house, taking off her clothes when asked, arousing the jealousy of the servants and the repressed passion of Jean (a moody Vincent Rottiers), who returns wounded and traumatised from the Western Front.

“She’s a very modern character,” says Theret. “She speaks very spontaneously. It wasn’t easy at that time for a young woman from her background to be free. The housekeeper tells her, 'You came here as a model, but you’ll end up a servant.’ But she won’t accept that.”

The action proceeds through suggestive silence as much as dialogue, giving space to physical processes – the washing of the old painter’s hands, the squeezing of oil paint onto his palette – in a way that feels very, well, French.

“Growing up in the Seventies and Eighties, my view of cinema was dominated by American films – Scorsese, Coppola, de Palma,” says Bourdos. “My previous film was made in America [Afterwards with Evangeline Lilly and John Malkovich]. One day I was in the Met in New York when I came across a room of paintings by Cézanne and Renoir. I felt that I belong to these paintings.

“I grew up in Nice, and the light and atmosphere of these paintings felt really connected to me. So I started reading everything I could find about Cézanne and Renoir.”

Renoir is now the least regarded of the Impressionists. His views of long-haired girls and amply proportioned matrons, with their shimmering, soft-edged surfaces, tend to be written off as saccharine and sentimental – Impressionism at its most chocolate box. The status of his son Jean remains undimmed, certainly with critics; films such as La Règle du Jeu and La Grande Illusion regularly appear in polls of the 10 greatest films of all time. But he’s hardly the most relevant of directors for today’s cutting-edge film-makers.

“In France, Renoir is still a very popular painter, particularly with ordinary people. His work is very simple, very direct, you don’t need a lot of intellectual keys to enter it. The critics don’t like him so much, maybe for the same reasons. As for Jean, for film-makers he’s still the boss. His use of direct sound, developed in early films like La Chienne – using natural sound with all its background noise – is a tradition that all French directors follow, even if they don’t always associate it with him.” Indeed, this sonic fidelity to nature feels in essence Impressionist.

Bourdos’s film’s conceit is to film a moment in the declining years of Renoir père in the lyrical, poetic style of Renoir fils: with the white Midi dust blowing up into the sunlight, the camera moving around and through the open doors and windows of the old painter’s studio, creating a sense – typical of Renoir’s films – of being indoors and outdoors simultaneously. The film’s achievement is to make the contrasting approaches of the two artists feel part of a particularly French creative continuum.

“It’s an attitude they share,” says Bourdos. “It comes from the water.” From the water? “It’s to do with freedom and flow. If you look at Auguste’s paintings, the use of paint is very free, it’s not static, it’s always moving. Jean Renoir isn’t an architect of the cinema like Fritz Lang or Hitchcock, where everything is controlled and storyboarded. These are film-makers who are coming from the story. Jean is more to do with feelings and situations. His father says to him in the film, you have to look at life like a cork on a river – you go where the water takes you. That’s what Jean does in his films. With Hitchcock, you know within three shots that it’s a Hitchcock film. But with Jean Renoir, it’s much more difficult to pin down his approach, because the camera is so free. With him everything is always moving.”

The older Renoir inducts the younger into his fatalistic, essentially Mediterranean world-view, indifferent to ambition and morality, the sense of life’s inexorable flow paralleling the great brown stream that runs through The River, Jean Renoir’s 1951 English-language film, his first in colour, which provided a model for Bourdos’s film.

“The River is about a house and a garden, beautiful and idyllic, with three girls falling in love with men coming back from the war. It’s exactly the same situation with Andrée and Jean in my film.” Andrée pulls the withdrawn, taciturn Jean towards her. While a puzzling scene in an officers’ bar leaves you wondering if she has another life as a kind of prostitute, her interest in the wealthy Renoir family is prompted by something far more primal than mere gold-digging. As a woman, the film implies, she knows instinctively what’s good for her.

“She’s a go-getter,” says Theret. “She wants to transcend her situation, and she realises this family can help her do that. But she’s not scheming. She’s quite naive.”

While the film follows the popular notion that Andrée pushed Jean towards the cinema to further her own rather vague ambitions of becoming an actress, in real life Heuschling conducted herself with considerably less instinctive elegance than the character in Bourdos’s film. Similarly the real-life Jean Renoir can have been nothing like as passive as he appears here.

“Jean made 15 films in the Thirties alone,” says Renoir expert Christopher Faulkner. “You’ve got to have a lot of get-up-and-go to be able to do that. Andrée was certainly a factor in getting Jean involved in cinema. But his elder brother Pierre, an actor, was also an influence.”

While Andrée starred in Renoir’s first six films, under the name Catherine Hessling, and had smaller roles in the next three, their marriage and her inclusion in his films ended in 1928. It’s difficult to escape the idea that having found his feet as a director, at least partly with her support, he rather heartlessly threw her aside.

“She wanted the high life,” says Faulkner. “She had little real interest in acting or in looking after their son. He inherited great wealth on his father’s death in 1919. Both their heads were turned by the fact that they could do anything they wanted. He used the money to finance his career in cinema, which gave him stability. But she never found that. She married again after they split, but did very little real acting.”

Finally, though, Renoir isn’t so much a reconstruction of historical events, more a love letter to a certain idea of French culture, which hopes, along the way, to reinstate a long-derided artist.

“Picasso and Matisse both loved Renoir,” says Bourdos. “Because, unlike Monet, he keeps the human figure as the central element. His art is about the body. He says in the film, 'Flesh is everything.’ He tells his son, 'Your war will pass, but the flesh will go on.’ He’s about to die, but he’s not looking for a life after this life. There’s nothing mystical about Renoir’s art. It's about the pleasure of being alive, here and now.”